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Prototype 2: Marriage Proposal

In the recent week, me and my group have been scrambling to come up with ideas for the assigned prototype. The prototype involves a scripted sequence similar to the scripted beginning of Half Life (on the tram). The scene had to be related to a marriage proposal. It was based on the viral video featuring a live lip dub of Bruno Mars’ “Marry You” song. The following video can be found here:

Overview of our final product:

The final product we produced was based on a neighborhood scene. It was a scripted scene, where a car would travel through the neighborhood streets, similar to the viral video, to eventually reach a church at the end. Along the way there are particle effects added to convey a happy celebratory mood. The song we chose for our scene was Foo Fighter’s “Everlong.”

The write up was written collectively as a group, each person writing about the role they played in the prototype. Please excuse me if it sounds similar, in regards to the parts I contributed.

How I contributed:

My main role for this prototype was to model the setting for the scene. I originally started off with a city scene, thinking it would be a good idea to have the setting for the scene based on the city streets at night time. I also wanted the streets to spell out “Marry Me?” if the camera zoomed out to a top down view. After modelling a city landscape, it was decided it looked too industrial and cluttered and did not match the mood we were trying to convey for the scene.

Thankfully I did not spend too much time on this original scene, so scrapping the scene was not a huge blow, and in addition to building the original scene, it taught me many things on how to model the scene in my vision (motion paths etc.)

In the end, I decided to approach modelling the scene after a small quiet suburb/neighborhood to give the homely, humble and warm feeling we were trying to get the video to convey.

Here is a snippit/preview on a street level of the scene:

I also wanted to have a significant ending when the scripted car would reach the end. Here I added a church at the end of the streets. At this moment, the camera would pan out to give a top down view on the town, to write out the message of “Marry Me?”

Here is the top down view of the neighborhood.

My main challenge was making the letters/message on such a large scale that the player/viewer would not realize it was actually spelling out the message. I was aiming for them to think that it was just a series of twisty and straight streets. In the end, from the street level view, I don’t think players notice it is actually a large cursive message.

After I created the overall setting and scene, my other team members pooled together their assets such as particle systems, and it was all scripted together/sewn together to create out final product.

Conclusion:

Overall, I was very pleased with the scene I created for our prototype. It conveyed the motions through the setting exactly how I wanted to, much better than the industrial/urban mood the original city idea created.